I longingly remember being a Systems Administrator configuring all my infrastructure through a variety of consoles. Those days are far behind me now since I spend much of my time helping customers navigate the new cloud world where infrastructure is managed through automation. It can be difficult to orchestrate pieces of the infrastructure into your server provisioning lifecycle but some vendors are embracing the new provisioning methods. Rubrik is one infrastructure company that has built a platform to thrive in this new automated world.

Rubrik calls themselves the “Cloud Data Management Company”. This provoked Eric Shanks to ask the question, “What are the characteristics of a cloud product?” This is a very difficult question to answer and leaves too much room for ambiguity. This lack of formal definition creates the opportunity for almost any product vendor to call their product “Cloud Ready.” In this article, Eric sets out some definitions to see if Rubrik truly is a cloud solution.

Jeff Bezos has always advised to let your customers guide how you develop a product. In fact, one of the core missions of Amazon is to ensure, “every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” This is clearly what you see when peeling back the onion on the data management company, Rubrik. Like the winged monkeys marching in the “Wizard of Oz”, Rubrik has charted a course in the data ocean that’s taken them from a scrappy startup with a very intriguing scale-out based value prop, to a clear contender for Enterprise data management needs. While there has been a lot of buzz around features and functionality within the product, I’d like to take a step back to analyze how I feel they hit the mark for enterprise deployments today in the first of a few blog posts focusing on the product directly.

Rubrik’s that new backup solution that makes traditional backups a snap – pun intended. I’m a former Systems Administrator and there was absolutely nothing I hated more than managing backup jobs and reviewing why the backups failed all the time. I viewed backups as that thing I had to do each day as fast as possible, so I could get to the interesting parts of being a Systems Administrator like fielding support calls and patching servers. Hey, I was young and it was a phase I was going through, back off.

Backblaze just released their 10th annual survey results on backup frequency. As a personal and business backup provider, they have a clear interest in the responses. But, like their disk drive reliability numbers, it’s nice that they share the results publicly.

Veeam as a company has largely eschewed agents for their VM backup solutions. But when it comes to physical servers, the company is offer not one, but two agents to help with your backup and recovery needs.

Have you ever thought about what a backup is? I mean ?really ?think about it? I hadn’t until I read this piece by Preston de Guise. It seems that most of what I had thought about backups were either a tautology (a successful backup is a…backup), or relied on unspoken assumptions.

My life has been a lie. Up until reading this article, I thought my RAID setup was providing a backup of my data. I’ve longed idolized ZFS for its robust snapshotting capabilities, thinking that was a formidable backup as well. My walls of perception have been torn asunder by the fundamental question of what actually is a backup. This Socratic examination goes to the root of the question.

Between backup software, servers, proxies, catalog databases, tape archives, and offsite storage there are a lot of places for things to go wrong, or get siloed off. Rubrik thinks they have a more complete offering that brings together all of these elements into one manageable service.

Andrea Mauro of vInfrastructure Blog comments: Scale Computing, an alternative hyperconverged solution, has launched its ScaleCare Remote Recovery Service, a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering that provides offsite protection for businesses at a price that fits the size and budget of their datacenter needs. Building on the resiliency and high availability of the […]